Will The Following Jump Ahead in Time for Season 2?

Fox's serial killer drama The Following won't be back on the air until January, but the cast and crew are already at work on Season 2, according to star Kevin Bacon.

"They're in the writers room now, so I don't know if any decisions have really been made," Bacon tells TVGuide.com about the upcoming sophomore season. "But one of the ideas is to kind of jump ahead in time, and maybe find [Ryan Hardy] in a different sort of head space."

Unless he's talking about the afterlife, fans can safely assume that the stab wound his character suffered in the last scene of April's shocking Season 1 finale isn't a fatal one. (The actor also let slip that he has a six-year contract with the show.)

"Maybe he has repaired himself," Bacon speculates about Ryan's potential character arc in Season 2. "I don't know. That's a lot to come back from. Certainly there's going to be residual pain."

Bacon is looking forward to potentially introducing fans to different version of Ryan Hardy. "My dream is that we'll see a new side to Ryan's character," he said during a Q&A at the Paley Center in New York City with TV Guide Magazine last week. "I want to keep peeling back the layers of who this guy is."

Also up in the air is whether Ryan's love interest, Claire (Natalie Zea), who was also stabbed in the finale, will be returning. "Nobody has job security on our show," Bacon admitted.

But even with main villain Joe Carroll (James Purefoy) also possibly killed off in the finale, Ryan won't be able to close the case file just yet. Viewers know that many of Carroll's followers — most notably Emma (Valorie Curry) — are still at large.

"We didn't get everybody," Bacon teases. "There were a lot of people who were in that cult who got away."

What direction do you think The Following should take in Season 2? And check out our exclusive interview with bandmates and brothers Kevin and Michael Bacon, where we quiz them on how well they know each other: